Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo, (1802-85). French Romantic poet, novelist, and dramatist, the son of a Napoleonic general. His earliest publications were poems but he made his name with the Romantic drama Hernani (1830). The poems Autumn Leaves (1831) and the novel The Hunch-back of Notre Dame (1831) confirmed his success. Juliette Drouet, the courtesan who was Hugo’s mistress for 50 years, appeared in his play Lucrece Borgia (1833). After the 1848 Revolution Hugo was elected deputy for Paris but he fled at the establishment of the Second Empire in 1851. Les Miserables (1862), one of his best-known novels, was written in exile in the Channel Islands. He returned to France as a national hero at the fall of the Second Empire in 1870 and received a state funeral in 1885.
